Читать книгу Life's Adventure - Philip Gibbs - Страница 10

Table of Contents

How sour sweet music is when time

Is broke and no proportion kept!

So is it in the music of men’s lives.

Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Looking back on life I sometimes wonder how many happy people I have met and what is the secret of happiness if it can be attained. The sweet music of life is so often jangled by false notes and disharmonies in one’s own nature or by the rough insensitive hands of an unkind world.

Perhaps at the best some of us can only expect moments of happiness, a brief and passing ecstasy, when one seems to be filled with the glory and splendour of life—how rare and wonderful!—or an occasional period of peace and contentment.

The Thinker, the Poet, the soul who is sensitive to human misery and the world’s agony, is not, as a rule, a happy fellow. He suffers because of other people’s sufferings. He despairs because of other men’s folly and wickedness. Certainly for the past forty years or so they have had some difficulty in keeping cheerful and have not done so, poor lads! My own lifetime has been a period of war—three wars of our own—and a world in chaos. The chance of atomic warfare and the hydrogen bomb does not encourage a happy optimism. Between the wars our poets did not sing glad songs. They found life senseless and abominable. In his Waste Land, T. S. Eliot had no hope to offer. Dylan Thomas, Day Lewis, Stephen Spender and the rest expressed a dark melancholy. No one could cheer them up or get a laugh out of their words.

But even in war-time, even when London was burning and the streets were littered with glass, there were cheery folk about. What was their secret? If we could find that we might get a clue to the quest of happiness. Was it some supernatural courage in them, or perhaps some spiritual faith, which annihilated the fear of death, or was it just unconquerable valour of the average man and woman?

Our Cockney folk, for instance? I used to talk with them when their shops had been blasted overnight, or when their little homes had been knocked about above their cellars.

“Weren’t you afraid?” I asked a girl who had come to her tobacco kiosk after a night of bombing over Brixton way.

“Afraid?” she asked with astonishment. “What’s the good of being afraid? That’s silly!”

She wasn’t a saint or a heroine, but there was something in her spirit which rose above fear.

“They can break our windows but not our spirit.” ... “We believe in fresh air.” ... “Business as usual.” ...

So they wrote these slogans after a night of gunfire and bombardment.

“Hadn’t you better get away from here?” I asked an old woman in a mews from which her neighbours had fled.

“Get away?” she asked indignantly. “I’m not going to be budged by that man Hitler.”

In that old woman’s mind was some tremendous pride stronger than the fear of death—and death isn’t pleasant even if one has faith in the next world.

It is the people with a strong and simple faith who, I believe, have the best chance of happiness. It gives them a sense of proportion regarding the things that matter and don’t matter, a better sense of values. I am not thinking of the great mystics who had the beatific vision, but of ordinary simple men and women sustained by a belief in divine goodness and pity and love.

During the last war a community of nuns came to dwell in a Surrey house built in the midst of a wood. It belonged to my son, who was away from it. I saw them from time to time and marvelled at their cheerfulness. The Reverend Mother is a laughing lady. Whenever I saw her she seemed to find some cause for merriment, and the other nuns seemed to be filled with the same spirit of serenity and humour. They went for long walks across the heaths and commons, and the villagers stared at them and smiled, because they were like children in the enjoyment of nature, with the wind blowing their black gowns. Yet they were not removed from the perils of war. The German bombers came over the chimney tops. A falling bomb made a hole as big as a cottage within a hundred feet of their front door. One night a load of incendiary bombs was dropped over the house and garden, starting many little fires. One crashed through the roof and was burning in the attic. If not put out the whole house would go up in smoke and flame. One of the nuns, a buxom, merry-eyed lady, climbed up a ladder and crawled through a trap-door and poured water over the smouldering fire. All through the night, with the help of a girl from a neighbouring cottage, they dealt with other incendiaries scattered about the grounds. Their laughter rang out as they described this alarming adventure.

I have known other men and women who have “the Faith,” as the Irish call it—priests, sisters of charity (who call on me once a year), nurses in hospital and padres in time of war. One might imagine they would be lacking in humour and laughter. They have given up a lot—home life, the love of women, children of their own. Yet those I have met are remarkably cheerful, quick to see a joke and glad of one. They have a serenity which saves them from fussing over the minor irritations of daily life. They have some inner light which saves them from the darkness of despair even when life around them is tragic and terrible.

One of the gayest men I know is called Father Paul of Warsaw. There is always a laugh in his blue eyes in spite of tragic memories when he was in the midst of the Warsaw Rising among the wounded and the dead. It was he who led the survivors from an annihilating bombardment through the sewers on a via dolorosa of filth and stench.

A great help to happiness is a sense of humour, and that must be born in one—the luckiest gift of the good fairies, enabling one to get a laugh out of one’s own misadventures and adversities. It is best of all and a rare quality if one can laugh at oneself for one’s own foolishness. These humorists not only get a lot of fun out of life for themselves but give it out to the company around them. I have known men and women who light up a room when they come into it. Life becomes less dull in their presence. They warm up the atmosphere about them. I am reminded of one of them I knew by a book I have just been reading—The Life of Beerbohm Tree, by Hesketh Pearson.

In spite of an explosive temperament which caused him to rage and storm when rehearsals were going badly and when he was exasperated by overwork and worry, his abiding sense of humour came to his rescue, and his rage would often end in a gust of laughter. He just could not resist seeing the comic side of things or enlivening a scene by a practical joke or a flash of wit. Hesketh Pearson describes how, when Tree played in The Light that Failed, he was supposed to be lying dead under the Union Jack while the Last Post was sounded above his body. But he endangered the solemnity of the scene by blowing up the flag from his face by every breath he expelled, “the rest of the company having to appear unconscious of this uncorpselike proceeding.” I was with him at a luncheon when he entertained a Sicilian player named Grasso who had astonished the play-going public by the terrific passion of his acting. In private life his manner was emotional and alarming. Upon entering the room he kissed Tree on both cheeks. He kissed H. B. Irving on both cheeks. He kissed me on both cheeks, as though his heart were bursting with love for us. He had given an amazing performance of Othello in which he had interpreted the Moor as a human furnace of primitive emotion. He had to leave our luncheon-table early for a matinée.

“I regret that Signor Grasso has had to leave us so soon,” said Tree, “but he has forgotten to kiss the fireman at His Majesty’s.”

He added a thought that had just come to him.

“It is perhaps a mistake that he should play the part of Othello because of that trouble about a handkerchief. It is difficult to believe that Grasso’s Othello would have had a handkerchief.”

(It was a humorous suggestion that Grasso himself, a Sicilian peasant, would not bother about the formal way of blowing his nose!)

Beerbohm Tree was described by his half-brother Max Beerbohm as a radiant man, and that was true. There was a radiance in him because of his wit and humour and love of laughter. He liked his own jokes. When he said a good thing, as often he did, he would say, “Excuse me,” and make a note of it for future use. The witticisms which flowed from him were never cruel or malicious like those of W. S. Gilbert, who said of Tree’s Hamlet that it was “funny without being vulgar.”

The English people on the whole are not witty like the French, who have a quick verbal wit with which we cannot compete. Not long ago, for instance, a young husband and wife who live in my village went for a holiday abroad and took their car. In the French port they became separated because of trouble in getting the car off the boat. Somewhat distressed, the pretty young wife approached a gendarme on the quayside and said in her best French, “I am getting alarmed. I have lost my husband!”

“Madame,” said the gendarme, “now that you are in France you will be able to find many husbands.”

Nor have we as a people the gift of rapid backchat like the Americans.

Stepping out of a club in New York in a blinding snowstorm I went up to an American “cop” and said in an absurdly English way, “I say, I want to go to the Union Club.”

“Well, why the hell don’t you go there,” he answered with a good-natured grin.

I asked an American girl what she thought of a certain politician.

“Well,” she said, “he keeps himself in the public eye—like a cinder.”

We don’t indulge in verbal wit of that kind, but the English people have an underlying sense of humour which keeps them sane and keeps them steady even in times of crisis. They refuse to meet trouble halfway. They don’t get panicky when other nations have the jitters. During the Suez crisis, when Russia was uttering threats of a menacing kind, there was extreme nervousness in Paris, I was told. Many people were getting ready for flight and there was a lot of food hoarding. In the United States the government ordered the Fleet out to sea to avoid another Pearl Harbour, and every night there were watchers along the Atlantic coast for the possible arrival of Russian bombers. In England there was no sign of panic, though we were vulnerable to the guided missiles suggested by Mr. Bulganin to President Eisenhower. There was no slackening in the attendance at football matches. And people refused to be rattled.

Now and again one is tempted to take a poor view of our present-day character, especially among the younger crowd. Some of them adopt the attitude of “I couldn’t care less.” The working man dilly-dallies with his job and spreads it out by tea-making and chit-chat. He is always asking for higher wages and shorter hours, though he knows, or ought to know, that every increase in wages without more production means a further rise in the cost of living and less value to the pound sterling. The Teddy boys, the cosh boys and the juvenile delinquents are a distressing problem in our social life. In some districts the police are afraid to tackle those young ruffians. This side of the picture is painted in dark colours by social observers, and it is not a pretty picture. But one tends to exaggerate the importance of it in the country as a whole. When I was getting material for a book called The New Elizabethans I went forth to have a look at the younger crowd in the Army, Navy and Air Force, factories and training schools. It was a reassuring experience. So far from being a poor lot I found them keen, high-spirited, and splendid in their cheerful acceptance of life and work.

I spent some time in the training schools of the R.A.F. One could not meet a finer crowd of young men if one searched the world. At Cranwell I sat at table with them one night after seeing a good deal of their activities and discipline, and after talking with many of them. As I looked along their line I was glad to be in their company. They take great risks. It is no safe game to fly these jets and faster-than-sound machines. These lads, I thought, have inherited the spirit of those who saved England in the Battle of Britain.

So it was in the Navy. The Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, told me he had never had a finer crowd of youngsters, and the Commander of our submarine fleet said “the best vintage ever.”

I was present in an aircraft carrier—Implacable—when there was a sham battle in progress, very noisy and exciting, and afterwards I watched the return of a squadron of planes to the upper deck. One by one, at intervals of a few seconds, they swooped down, alighted, and at the end of their run folded their wings like birds. A perilous exercise, I thought.

“Do you feel nervous about it?” I asked one of them.

“Well, it’s always a bit tricky,” he confessed.

One of these pilots had been in action off Korea. He looked no more than an apple-cheeked boy, but he had had some pretty close shaves. Once he came down into “the drink,” and it didn’t look good until a helicopter came hovering over him, let down a hook, and pulled him up. It was an American who rescued him. Not long afterwards our lad went down into the sea again. A helicopter hovered over him. “What, you here again!” shouted an American voice. And, incredible as it may seem, it happened a third time, and all the American could say was, “Well, I’m darned! You’re making a habit of it!”

When I was at Manby, a kind of post-graduate college for senior officers of the R.A.F., I suggested that I might have a flight in a Meteor jet.

“Why not!” was the answer of the commanding officer. “How about four o’clock this afternoon?” At four o’clock a Meteor jet arrived from another station. It was a jet fighter with seats for two, one behind each other. The pilot was a very young fellow, who might have been my grandson as far as age goes. He seemed amused to have me as a passenger, the oldest bird who had ever flown with him. He helped me to put on the necessary gear, which was so cumbersome that when I had got it all on I could hardly move hand or limb. He instructed me what to do in case of accident.

“You pull this if you want to be ejected. You pull that if you want to use your parachute.”

“My dear fellow,” I told him, “I shan’t pull anything. I’m certain to pull the wrong handle.”

He grinned good naturedly, and I had every confidence in this child who had my life in his hands. I sat behind him and he talked to me through the intercom.

“Feeling all right, sir?”

“Quite all right.”

“Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

“Grand!”

He did a kind of weaving through the sky. There was no vibration. There was no sound. We left our noise behind us. One was unconscious of speed, unless one passed a slow-going plane—as we did. We passed it in a flash. Certainly we were travelling. I suppose I was up about half an hour. We covered a lot of space over land and sea. When we came down as gently as an autumn leaf my young pilot smiled at me, still amused by this ancient man.

“None the worse?” he asked.

“All the better for it.”

He announced to a group of officers that I had been “a perfect passenger.” But he had been a perfect pilot, and I marvelled at the skill and valour of youth that can handle such a box of tricks at terrifying speed with such cool nerve and confidence. They know the risks they take. Within a few months of my flight there were several crashes of these Meteor jets. “Risks?” they ask. “Well, life is very uncertain anyhow. There are lots of accidents on the roads down below.”

So there is nothing wrong with the courage of the younger crowd. They have the heroic tradition in their blood, though they would hate me to say so as they are very shy about that kind of thing.

I went to the research department of a great factory which provides light and warmth to most of this country, as well as radar equipment and many miracles of modern science. It is an immense place, crowded with young men and women doing their jobs in different rooms but getting together after hours for dancing, music, ju jitsu, and many forms of exercise and entertainment. Many of the girls, as well as the men, were swotting to get a B.Sc. I spent the day talking to them and finding out something about their private lives and their ideas about life itself. They were just the ordinary dwellers in suburban homes, having to train or bus to their daily work, getting home in time for an evening meal, listening to the news on the wireless, doing a bit of study in their bedrooms because the kids are making a noise downstairs, with no great margin of time or money for a bit of fun outside the home. But they were happy in their work, which I thought was a tribute to the management and to some inner glow in their own minds. I am sure they were happy. One could see that by passing them down the corridors and talking to them on the quiet.

“Happy? Yes, why not? We’re keen on our jobs—always something to learn. And this place provides a lot of fun if one wants it. Have you seen the ballroom?”

Yes, I had seen the ballroom. It was magnificent, and as I looked at it I thought of the miracle that had happened in the industrial life of England since the days of sweated labour and child labour in factories and Tom Moore’s “Song of the Shirt.” They were all level-headed, unaffected, and straight in their answers to my questions. No simpering or blushing among the girls. They looked you in the eye and answered thoughtfully and honestly. I have a conviction that the modern girl of this class has produced a type more intelligent, better poised, better educated, and more self-confident than any previous generation. That is a great hope for the future and a cure for pessimism.

There are, of course, others of a different class—those silly creatures who get hysterical over film stars, go mad to the rhythmic beat of “Rock an’ Roll.” But those are small groups in the flare and fever of Vanity Fair.

I have found another cure for pessimism about the character of our English folk. Curiously enough, that is on the “wireless,” which often, I confess, causes me to groan over some of its programmes which are supposed to be funny. Wilfred Pickles in “Have a Go” has done much to reveal the true quality, the splendid stuff of life, the courage and humour and happiness—yes, happiness—which still characterises our people up and down the country. He goes about to many cities and many small towns and villages, sometimes very remote, and there he gets together an audience who laugh heartily at the very sight of him and know in advance the ridiculous questions he is going to ask them.

“Now, love, have you had any embarrassing moment in your life?”

“Have you got a young man, dearie? What, not a young man yet? I say, that’s a pity!”

“Can you give the names of the songs we’re going to play for you? Half a crown if you answer the first of them right. Give her half-a-crown, Mabel!”

“Now, if you had three wishes, what would you ask for?”

“If you had the power to reform the law of the land, what would you do to make the world a happier place?”

Simple, almost childish questions, asked with the greatest good humour and a friendly human warmth, but not likely, one might think, to reveal anything remarkable. But they do! By some skill or good fortune, Wilfred Pickles summons up from his audience a series of astonishing and sometimes glorious types of character—old women of unconquerable spirit after a life of toil, full of humour and wisdom; old men and young men with never a grouse against fate, and who take life smiling and like their jobs and do a bit of good to their neighbours, and keep a little flame of idealism to light the way ahead; and young girls, laughter-loving but straight-thinking and straight-speaking about love and marriage and having babies and getting happiness out of life by just living.

Listening to “Have a Go” I think these people are wonderful. They’re the salt of the earth—these old charwomen; these mothers of big families; these sturdy, simple men; those of the soil and the sea; frank, unaffected young women. England is all right. There is nothing wrong with it in town and country. And, thank goodness, they still know how to laugh and to get a lot of happiness out of life.

Nobody finds happiness by searching for it. Those who go pleasure-hunting find that it eludes them. The most bored people I have ever met were those who put up in the luxury hotels of Monte Carlo and the Riviera—those rich, elderly women who hired gigolos to dance with them; those frequenters of the gambling rooms who went night after night to back their luck at the tables. I used to watch them now and then, grim-faced, repulsive-looking, horrible in their obsession with the spinning wheel of luck, which made a mockery of their “systems” and led them down the road to ruin almost certainly in the long run. One could see by the strained look on their painted faces and by their crisped fingers when they grabbed their winnings or put down their chips, that behind their masks they were racked by greed and fear.

Some literary friends of mine lived on the Riviera because of the climate, but they did not go much to the Casino and found pleasure in their work and talk. One was Phillips Oppenheim, who wrote “thrillers” dictated to his secretary; and another, W. J. Locke, author of The Beloved Vagabond and many other amusing novels. It pleased Locke to give elaborate luncheon parties to his friends. He provided them with exquisite food and wines of famous vintage years. He was a genial and courteous host to those authors and publishers and literary agents and journalists, and pretty ladies in the very short frocks of the time.

Conversation at table was always amusing, until the guests were stupefied by too many wines, followed by old brandy in immensely big glasses. The luncheons lasted long. Outside a hot sun was shining. It was not really one of the haunts of happiness.

There were gala nights in the luxury hotels. Saxophones wailed and cackled, middle-aged women banged balloons at their men and danced on crowded floors to the monotonous beat of jazz hands. But it was an artificial gaiety without joy.

“I find this kind of life horrible,” said a lady I knew. “It all seems so senseless.”

She had come out in search of pleasure, but she found only a false and futile waste of time.

Where can one find the key to happiness, as far as happiness is possible in a tortured world? There are, perhaps, several keys which unlock the golden gate. I think one of them is self-forgetfulness. The intellectuals and the egoists are not among the happy ones. They are always worrying about their inner conflicts with dissatisfied yearnings to solve the riddle of life. It is those who look outward rather than inward who find contentment.

“Thank goodness I’m not an introvert!” says my friend Frank Swinnerton. “I was born an extrovert interested in other people. It never occurs to me to analyse myself or reveal my secret emotions. I don’t believe much in self-revelation.”

Happy is the man who forgets himself in his work or in his hobbies. At least he has the best chance of escaping from the nagging misery of introspection. Artists, musicians, actors, singers are among the lucky ones if they are not too desperately troubled by financial anxiety.

“Why do you go on painting?” I asked an old friend of mine, who still produced pictures which, alas! nobody would buy.

“Two reasons,” he told me. “One is that it’s an anodyne. One forgets oneself and the annoyances of life. The other is that I do it to please myself.”

I met an artist carrying his easel and sketching-stool and oil-colours. It was at a time when few pictures were being sold.

“A hard life!” I said after a few primary remarks. He smiled at me cheerfully.

“I enjoy every minute of it,” he told me.

Winston Churchill encouraged the amateur artist by his little book on painting for pleasure and by his own work in the Royal Academy. When I spent a day with him in his house at Chartwell he showed me his studio (built by his own hands as a master bricklayer) and some of his paintings.

“I regard a day as ill-spent,” he told me, “if I haven’t painted two pictures.”

“My dear Mr. Churchill,” I exclaimed, “the professional painter is more than satisfied if he paints two pictures in two months.”

When for a time the political situation turned against him he went to Italy for a painting holiday, and a friend of mine—a brigadier general—entertained him.

“What time lunch today, sir?” he would ask.

“Oh, just as usual—one o’clock,” said Churchill.

He was still out with his easel at two o’clock—half-past two—a quarter to three. At three o’clock he returned, with apologies and a wet canvas. He had not been worrying about the political situation. He hadn’t given it a thought.

For a time I was a passionate amateur with oils. A brother of mine, equally enthusiastic, drove me to the mountains behind Nice, on the outskirts of St. Pol or Vence. We hardly exchanged a sentence. In a pair of old jeans I wallowed in oil-paint. We forgot to have lunch until the pangs of hunger assailed us in the afternoon. When one is painting with the fine frenzy of an enthusiastic amateur one forgets everything—one’s family and friends, one’s financial worries, one’s need of nourishment, and by this forgetfulness one finds one of the keys to happiness. For the secret is to get outside oneself.

There are moments in life very rare and very wonderful in which one has a sense of ecstasy. It is nearly always when the beauty of nature seems to make one a part of it and to fill one for a moment with its glory and vital force. It need not be because of some wonderful view or splendour of scene, but when the trees come to life with the fresh green of awakening spring, or when a wet wind blows in one’s face on an open heath, or when the first crocus is glinting with gold in the garden. It comes to young people in their revelation of life’s enchantment. A tiny boy I knew came into my garden and saw the first snowdrops of the year. He gave a cry of joy and, kneeling down, kissed them. I was deeply touched by this nature worship. Then there is the ecstasy of love when two young things are drawn to each other in worship of mind and body, beyond their understanding, beyond the commonplace of experience, beyond the material world around them. That is the most divine revelation of human happiness. But all that has been written by the poets, and now one hardly dare speak the word of Love because it has been debased and made ridiculous and vulgar by those dreadful crooners, those harsh-voiced women who imitate the American cabaret singers, and all the false and ghastly stuff which pours through the radio. Some other name ought to be invented for that beating of the heart.

The music of men’s lives, to use Shakespeare’s words again, is jangled nowadays by false notes and dissonance, and the noise of conflict comes crashing in from the outer world, but there are still many people who have found a quiet harmony in their own way of life. They are the workers, the home lovers, the country and suburban folk who are not feverish in their search for happiness but find it in a garden or a playing-field or even at the kitchen sink.

They are the ordinary folk with a living wage and not much more, with families to raise, and friendly neighbours, and a hobby of their own for leisure hours. Nobody writes about them. They are not spurred on by ambition or fame. They just do their jobs and carry on with common sense and cheerfulness. Without seeking it they have found, to some extent, the whereabouts of happiness, not in the seats of the mighty or in hôtels de luxe, but more often in a bed-sitting room, a cottage parlour, a council house or a pre-fab.